


damn if you don't

by orphan_account



Series: ripples [10]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - James Bond Fusion, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Inspired by Skyfall, Non-Chronological, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:28:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22838590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Natasha is a double-oh, and she copes.
Series: ripples [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1032564
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Also, I guess everyone who works at MI6 has a English accent now. Do with that what you will. Also, I tried doing research to maintain some degree of accuracy, but all the espionage stuff is wildly inaccurate, regardless.

Natasha’s at another ball, wearing another dress that makes her long for ratty t-shirts and sweatpants and heels that she’d kill someone to get off.

She’s here undercover. Meaningless small talk she’s practically fluent in, and the giggles and small, flirtatious smiles that she carefully inserts never fail to charm. Her eyes dart to perfectly pressed suits and beautiful evening gowns, searching for her way in.

M has sent her on another trip, this time to Copenhagen. There's been talk of a list circulating around the intelligence community recently, bouncing from country to country, currently (until now) finding a home in New York City - something that Q branch has labeled the ultimate shit list. It's a record generated through illegal data mining on threat assessments on classified individuals - agents, heads of state, heads of agencies like Six, anyone important.

A month ago, there'd been a massive data dump on the Internet - secrets lay bare for anyone to see - a quarter of the shit list. People saw. And people started to disappear. 

Phil Coulson's body had been found, three blocks from his apartment. 

When Natasha had looked at M, waiting for more, she'd just steepled her fingers and stared right back. Even though her dark hair was streaked with steel grey, her eyes were still sharp and knowing. Her lipstick was the same startling shade of red - a trademark of her time as 0013.

"Romanoff," she'd said. "This is of the utmost important." That was it. Some random contact in some random Copenhagen ball.

Natasha knew that. She'd crossed her arms. "It would be _more_ important if you gave me more than the minimum, M _."_

M hadn't budged.

And that was how Natasha had ended up in this ridiculous outfit, at this ball. Her job right now is to find her contact.

Clint Barton had barged in two weeks ago, adamant that the list had made its way to Europe through underground cyberterrorism channels. 

He'd been a live wire. "That thing is fucking _dangerous_ \- do you know what happens if it gets out again? Another fucking data dump?" 

Natasha had thought of a gun balanced her palms and the brief moment before the absoluteness of a bullet hole. She had thought of Coulson, who'd been M's CIA consult for years - his bland voice with only what you were looking for, always wearing some ridiculous tie.

The last time, it had been tiny TARDISes. 

Then she'd thought of Q - manic, brilliant Q, bites her lip. The wine red lipstick is cakey on her teeth. 

Clint, who'd for some reason, decided to hang around MI6 instead of hightailing it back to the CIA, had raised an eyebrow at the dress. Natasha doesn't care. It's just a costume after all. 

A twist of something sharp arches around her chest, remembering the first time the Widow's Bites had sat in her hands. Q was snarky, almost sharp, but Natasha could match him with dryness well enough for them to develop some sort of strange connection. He'd made the name for the weapons up himself - he had defied every single thing she had made up about him. 

M had told her what had happened to Q on a sharp, rainy day, and she’d felt her mouth flood with bitterness, her eyes prickling in something so foreign that it took her a moment to figure it out. There was no recovery.

But MI6 needed a Q. It has always needed one, and as of last week it does. That's what's she's been told anyway.

* * *

Natasha's not looking at this painting, clad in a blood red dress and Christian Louboutins that dare to kill anyone that stares too long. Some agent's gone rogue and started their own operation somewhere in France and N has put her as the agent in charge. Natasha's a newly minted double-oh agent, cool and composed, and willing to take no shit.

So when a voice says, "Abstract. I think it represents freedom and virtue and all those bloody values. Like this American agent I know," she doesn't budge. "Rogers, I think? Nice chap, bit wound up, but his partner's fucking scary as shit. Though I have my doubts on whether they're _just_ partners - " 

The prattling continues, and Natasha, very carefully forces herself not to react.

Eventually, she turns, and finds a man, barely taller than her, munching on a bag of Lays, wearing a classy getup and sunglasses. Natasha, of course, says nothing at all, but the man prodded her again. "What do you think?" 

Natasha sighs, checks her phone. She looks at the painting, and it folds itself into a landscape, scarlet red sky and faint stars in the distance.

She says, not daring to look at the man, "I think it's a lovely rendition of a sunrise. Excuse me."

Natasha goes to get up, only for the man to stop her short, heart frozen in her chest like ice.

"Honestly, I'm not that boring, am I, 007?"

Natasha shifts back, ready to deny, but silence only came in her wake.

The man answers her own thoughts, racing at Mach speed. "I'll save you the pain. I could be your enemy. You know that, I know that. But I get a better paycheck doing this quartermaster shit and fuck knows I need my finer things." 

She stares at him for an uncomfortably long time. He only grins, takes off his glasses, and she's met with bright brown eyes with a hint of amber, mischief hiding a hard shell of brainpower. He gives her a pout.

"What? Is it the goatee? I look shitty, don't I? Don't mince your words, I can take it."

She doesn't know what to say. The words, if they had even been words, are stuck like a pill in her throat. It's only when he presses the stingers in her hand that she snaps out of it.

* * *

  
  
Natasha blinks and can't help but letting a faint smile curl her lips. She still had those stingers in her purse, sitting like broken parts of old memories. Q had named them Widow's Bites, she remembers, because he had explained, you're like one of those spiders, you know, you catch them and you strike.

She had laughed, warm, like a rush of tea pooling in her throat.

Natasha glances around the ballroom one more time, catches sight of a sleek black ponytail. For the first time in ages, her lips turn up. 

There he is. 

There he is. 


	2. Chapter 2

Q fits his role - not quite perfectly, just a bit uneven around the edges. Natasha muses that that was made him so interesting. Why she could tolerate him - he veered almost right off the edge of normal. She was a realist and he was an exception. 

"So," he says, casual, typing leisurely but probably hacking into MI5's files for the second time in a month. Fury was going to kill him. M wouldn't. "You appreciate this all, don't you, Romanoff?" 

She cocks a hip. "Don't fool yourself, Q. Everyone knows I play nice for better weapons." 

There's a couple of sniggers from the younger Q branch techs; Q rolls his eyes and lets his mouth set in a lazy grin. 

He taps away. "I've got something new. Well -" 

His face turns into something she'd never seen before. "Not me, anyway." 

Q twists about his station, looking backward. "Where are the redesigns for the Bites?" 

One of the Q branch technicians at the stations farthest from the entrance hurries with a tablet in his arms, fingers flicking expertly across. "Got it! Wait - " 

He runs up to the two of them, eyes still on the tablet before he looks up and catches sight of Natasha. He stares at her- Natasha leveled a cool gaze at him. He looks like a kid, with his bushy brown hair, a string of freckles lightly smattered on his nose, his fading t-shirt, and half agape mouth. 

"Oh," the tech says. "This is new! Um-" 

He shifts his face down to the tablet and flicks again before handing it to Q. 

"Ah," Q says, brightly, eyes scanning the designs. "Nicely done, P." 

The kid looks slightly mortified before Natasha replays the last ten seconds. 

"P." She stares at Q for another second before crossing her arms. "A new one. Very creative. Are you renaming the branch too?" 

Q waves her off. "Q, R, P, it's all the same." He cheekily grins at her, the lines around his eyes deepening. "As a former R myself, I don't give a shit." 

She didn't know that - then again, she's never really gone down to the branch before this Q. The previous Q, a mostly bald, condescending man, had banned the field agents down there after a bad incident with a reactor. 

"Well," Natasha says, giving P a onceover. How old was he? Was this even legal? M bent the rules more times than she'd admit. 

* * *

Logically, she knows there's something wrong with M playing it a little fast and loose - there is a part of her that lashes out against it like a viper. Logically, it's wrong to pluck children _(was he a child?),_ or teenagers, or under-twenty somethings, and train them for some unforeseen war. Logically, Natasha has gone through that, leading to scarlet all over her ledger, leading her to understand death before she knew what life was. 

Even more so, though, Six makes it a choice. It isn't always a good choice - there are very few good choices when you're part of Six. Natasha remembers her third field mission where she'd been forced to choose between getting poisoned and obtaining an encrypted drive or not getting poisoned and fighting her way through a world-class security system for the disk. She'd called her captor a fucking idiot, hissed it out with beaten green eyes, but he hadn't understood Russian. 

Nevertheless, they're black and white on this - accepting a job where your mouth is sealed and you have to lie, where there's a chance of dying, regardless of what you do. Even if Six is gray on everything else, this was absolute.

Natasha doesn't get it - the whole world's never going to be the same way as those black and white choices. It doesn't make the choices right, just because the options are limited.

"Yes or no," M had said, when Natasha had woken in the Six infirmary, the very first time. They - they, they, Natasha can't say their names, wanted her to burn an orphanage in Ghent to the ground. Some illegitimate Belgium royal they'd snatched away and statshed there years ago was starting to uncover things.

She hadn't. 

"Ms. Romanova," M had murmured, looking perfectly classy with her dark hair in a bun, her hands clasping a cup of tea. "You are more than a weapon. You could find that here."

She had sipped her tea, and Natasha remembered, amidst the cloudy haze of sedatives, wondering why the fuck she'd been allowed to bring tea. It had been a strange thought, a _her_ thought, so stupid, because she hadn't been allowed to think like that in years. Wasn't it supposed to be sterile in here -

There's a lot of roundabout logic in this. It's probably the reason she's in the field and not in Q-branch. 

* * *

  
  


"It's a pleasure," Natasha says, still scanning P. "Though if it's Q who roped you in, I have questions." 

Between Q's groan and Natasha's answering smirk, P looks like he might implode. 

"I'm just going to -" he juts a thumb back to his station and runs away. 

Natasha looks after him as Q hooks the tablet to the bigger screen, muttering about shitty Bluetooth in underground tunnels.

"Where _did_ you find him?" she asks, halfway to amused. But when she looks at Q, his face is drawn up, his eyes dark and solemn. It's so strange to see such a morose look that Natasha wants to jolt. Wants to run.

She doesn't push on. P is hanging in the back somewhere anyway, and Natasha knows too well what your secrets feel like when they're spilled right in front of you. 

Her face must not say anything because Q plasters on a grin and shows her the wonders of streamlining and portability, and _look the voltage's upped by 40 percent,_ but still -

Natasha, for being an enigma herself, for being so wary and puzzling, for being so _goddamn_ infuriating, in Fury's words, doesn't do well with her own sort. 

She never has. 

* * *

Loki looks as refined as he should. Natasha doesn't surprise him; not anymore. They get drinks and sit; delicate, breakable flutes of tasteless champagne.

"Ah," he says, eyebrows raised. "Is my darling brother doing well for himself?"

Natasha recalls the last time she'd seen Thor. Thor, who'd had his hair shorn to his skull, dark and biting, a fair contrast to his grin. Natasha missed him, or missed him in the way you could miss a colleague that is not quite your friend. Strange, that was. 

"I heard he's in Colombia," she said, voice not a whisper, but not quite aloud either. "He got a haircut." Then. "Do you know-"  
  


Loki waves a hand - aloof, cultured, a prince in his own right. "Of course, of course, Romanoff. Everyone knows!" A pause, then his eyes narrow. He hisses, all tumbling and frantic, below the nonsense-small talk and stupidity, "What do you want me to say? That I know where it is? Just because I knew about the Tesseract-"

Natasha is coming to a realization; fast and slow, a rush and a drag all at once. She knew she should have fought M harder. She can heard the whole of Q branch breathing on the other side of her earpiece. She can hear them scrambling and talking and whispering - _how did we get it wrong, wasn't that intel good, weren't we good -_

"I wanted to ask," she segways, smooth and practiced. "If you'd heard about Q." 

Loki shuts up for a minute straight. Natasha thinks, thinks if they'd grown up together, if they'd been children for a little while, she would have smiled. 

"I did," he said, and he's flat. "Shame. I liked him. He was - _interesting."_

_Interesting_ is four syllables and short and does not say anything about Q. About - Natasha bites down, clamps down on his name, of a boy who'd grown up in the UK because of parents dead too early, of a boy who graduated from Oxford at 17, who wanted to create - who wanted to help people - who wanted to be a St - who wanted to be what his father never would. 

She does not think of P - P who had disappeared after his name had leaked after the Venice mission. Freckles and smiles and bushy brown hair and the same tune - dead parents, a desperate under-twenty-underling, desperate and wanting to be something else. 

This mission is doomed and tangled and wrong. This dress is a cage and these stilettos are knives and this mission was a fucking waste. 

This, Natasha does not say. Because beyond all things, she is a shadow and an under-twenty something who turned into a twenty-something and then a thirty-something, like plunking keys messily on a piano. 

She is more than a weapon. But being more than a weapon is a little less than being a person, and she's not quite that.

So, instead, she says, "He was," and sips the champagne, letting it burn all the way down. 

  



End file.
